"The world . . . is . . . hollow." This is the secret that Chunth, the Tel-Jilad troll elder, entrusts to Glissa Sunseeker before his death at the hands of a traitor. Armed with that knowledge, Glissa fights her way through the great vedalken capital of Lumengrid, down into the Pool of Knowledge. The Synod's sacred chamber contains a lacuna - a tunnel, saturated with blue mana - that leads to Mirrodin's secret interior. There, huge, bizarre towers of funguslike metal called mycosynth reach up toward an immense inner sun of pure mana.

As Glissa flees from her vedalken pursuers, she discovers another secret inside this plane. Memnarch is real, and he patiently waits for the elvish champion to find him. In the meantime, he has begun to build a monument to his greatness as an artificer: the Darksteel Eye, a device that will make his omniscience over Mirrodin complete.